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This is why I suggest something REALLY simple for the visual icon around a ship.

Size and IFF settings.
Represented by Shape and Color respectively.

The rest of the data about a ship is pulled with a dedicated scan, which you get when targeting them.

What we could do is have two TYPES of targeting, Active and Passive.
Passive gives you basic details, but doesn't alert them that you are looking at them.

While Active targeting has the possibility of alerting the target that they are being scanned, and will use your on-board scanners (if any), such as Cargo or Subsystem scanners.

You would need to be Actively targeting a ship for missile/weapons lock. Meaning that the target will always be alerted if you are going to use missiles (to help with the missile discussion elsewhere )

This would give us some very basic information at a glance, the more complex information with a quick target. (so you could quickly look over everyone in the local vicinity before making a move)

And Good information would inform your target that something is happening. (This would also go for the player, so you WILL know when you get cargo scanned while carrying contraband. :V A good idea, else smuggling will be a pain in the butt)

Katorone wrote:But add different types (freighter/civ/transporter/cap/fighter/...) to this and you have a huge amount of icons.
So I'd rather have icons per type, with a different colour for mass.

Wouldn't color be better suited to determine if the ship is hostile, friendly or neutral? If mass is important it should be a number that appears after the ship is scanned. To me though, I'd prefer to know shield and hull strength, and how functional the systems of the specific ship are.

You have a point. Maybe hue would be a better indicator of mass.
The exact mass, and other properties would be available by scanning. I'm just mainly thinking about a way to have an easy way to find targets on your HUD, which are the kind of target the ship you're flying is equipped/specced for. That's why I'm thinking mass is a good indicator to have.

Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.

Katorone wrote:But add different types (freighter/civ/transporter/cap/fighter/...) to this and you have a huge amount of icons.
So I'd rather have icons per type, with a different colour for mass.

Wouldn't color be better suited to determine if the ship is hostile, friendly or neutral? If mass is important it should be a number that appears after the ship is scanned. To me though, I'd prefer to know shield and hull strength, and how functional the systems of the specific ship are.

You have a point. Maybe hue would be a better indicator of mass.
The exact mass, and other properties would be available by scanning. I'm just mainly thinking about a way to have an easy way to find targets on your HUD, which are the kind of target the ship you're flying is equipped/specced for. That's why I'm thinking mass is a good indicator to have.

Hue then cuts out a chunk of the information for people who are partially color blind.

Remember that mass will typically fall within a range for given size categories.
And remember, that Mass means "Sweet FA" when it comes to combat.

The only three things you care about when approaching an area are:

The number of ships.
The Friend or Foe status of those ships.
The general size of each ship.

First is easy, number of items on screen is number of ships.
Second is color. Red for Hostile, Green for dedicated Ally, Yellow for Neutral, Grey/Blue for unknown.
Third is also easy, if we give ships categories of a sort, and can be represented by the various shapes.

Any further information cannot be easily and quickly displayed when you have two dozen ships in close proximity.
So you put this information into your scanning system. Target the ship, and you get info like size, weight, number of guns, estimated firepower.

This is also much more intuitive to new users.

I mean in reality we could dump ALL SORTS of data into the symbols, and they would become like NATO reporting symbols for units.
Hard to read if any are overlapped at all, hard to read for people new to it, hard to make smaller than a minimum size and still have readable...

We want to avoid those points. Avoid them like the plague.
There is a reason NATO reporting icons are *NOT* the default for Hearts of Iron. And that is it.

Even that is not exactly simple. As it is again, designed to be used by people with a specific set of knowledge already.

LT's GUI needs to be intuitive to new players, and still provide a depth of detail.
We can always modify our own GUI later, but the basic GUI that comes with the game needs to be intuitive and quick to read.

I suppose we could work from the existing symbols from the latest dev videos and go from there.

It sounds like we may want symbols based on role and or size of the object along with color coding for IFF. If we are all in agreement to this I guess we could start working on universal logos which would work well in LT.

BFett wrote:I suppose we could work from the existing symbols from the latest dev videos and go from there.

It sounds like we may want symbols based on role and or size of the object along with color coding for IFF. If we are all in agreement to this I guess we could start working on universal logos which would work well in LT.

Okay, so I like Silverware's suggestion and the colors he suggests: Red for Hostile, Green for dedicated Ally, Yellow for Neutral, Grey/Blue for unknown.

I personally would like Grey or white for neutral objects (such as containers, destroyed objects) and have Yellow reserved for unknown objects since those require caution (and caution is usually seen as yellow or orange in the real world)

BFett wrote:Okay, so I like Silverware's suggestion and the colors he suggests: Red for Hostile, Green for dedicated Ally, Yellow for Neutral, Grey/Blue for unknown.

I personally would like Grey or white for neutral objects (such as containers, destroyed objects) and have Yellow reserved for unknown objects since those require caution (and caution is usually seen as yellow or orange in the real world)

White for containers and other detritus.

Blue for ships emitting IFF of a faction we aren't strongly aligned to.
Green for ships emitting IFF of a friendly faction.
Red for those marked as hostile, or emitting IFF of a hostile faction.

Might strip a Blue/Green target with red when they attack you. This would make it obvious that they were being a dick.

Yellow for ships we have detected *WITHOUT* IFF online.

This means that Yellow/Red are close enough that you will have caution, but different enough to hopefully keep low level color blind people from mistaking them.

BFett wrote:Okay, so I like Silverware's suggestion and the colors he suggests: Red for Hostile, Green for dedicated Ally, Yellow for Neutral, Grey/Blue for unknown.

I personally would like Grey or white for neutral objects (such as containers, destroyed objects) and have Yellow reserved for unknown objects since those require caution (and caution is usually seen as yellow or orange in the real world)

White for containers and other detritus.

Blue for ships emitting IFF of a faction we aren't strongly aligned to.
Green for ships emitting IFF of a friendly faction.
Red for those marked as hostile, or emitting IFF of a hostile faction.

Might strip a Blue/Green target with red when they attack you. This would make it obvious that they were being a dick.

Yellow for ships we have detected *WITHOUT* IFF online.

This means that Yellow/Red are close enough that you will have caution, but different enough to hopefully keep low level color blind people from mistaking them.

Ha, I'm not saying that they are bad or anything, but it sounded as if people were looking for more variety. Specifically I believe we are still missing images for starships (such as carriers and freighters) as well as icons for asteroid fields, satellites and containers.